The Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA, Public Law 103-414) requires service providers to support lawful authorized electronic surveillance (LAES) activities as specified in United State Codes (U.S.C.) Titles 3, 18, 47, and 50. In packet-switched networks, there has been conflict between the requirements of law and the practical technical implementation of electronic surveillances. Specifically, the Federal Communications Commission, Third Report and Order (August 1999), permits an interim solution to law enforcement where the ‘full content’ of packet-switched communications can be captured and post-processing minimization performed on the communications to meet the legal limits of surveillance analogous to a pen register/trap and trace type surveillance (where the surveillance is limited to collecting From and To portions of e-mails, a list of web sites visited, or other types of “header” information) defined in U.S.C. Title 18.
Current electronic surveillances are performed by Carnivore, a system developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This system is not satisfactory, however, to a number of privacy groups and civil libertarians due in part to its intrinsic functional capability to exceed the scope of Title 18 (pen-mode) surveillances in packet-switched networks. The Carnivore system captures full packets and then breaks the packets down to obtain the addressing information that is contained in the packets' headers while at the same time relying on the trustworthiness of the law enforcement agent(s) performing the surveillance to not look at the message content of the packets. Moreover, the Carnivore system fails to provide an audit capability. Thus, the law enforcement agency that is conducting the surveillance has no way to show that the user settings for Carnivore correspond to those allowed in the warrant. There is also no way to identify which agent was at fault should Carnivore be used for illegal electronic surveillances.
Therefore, there exists a need for systems and methods that improve the performance of law-authorized electronic surveillances.